[PDF] The Roots Of Southern Writing Essays On The Literature Of The American South By C Hugh Holman eBook

Author : C. Hugh Holman
Publisher : University of Georgia Press
Page : 254 pages
File Size : 47,60 MB
Release : 2008
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 082033359X

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At the heart of the southern riddle you will find a union of opposites, a condition of instability, a paradox. Calm grace and raw hatred. Polished manners and violence. An intense individualism and intense group pressures toward conformity. A reverence to the point of idolatry of self-determining action and a caste and class structure presupposing an aristocratic hierarchy. A passion for political action and a willingness to surrender to the enslavement of demagogues. A love of the nation intense enough to make the South's fighting men notorious in our wars and the advocacy of interposition and of the public defiance of national law. A region breeding both Thomas Jefferson and John C. Calhoun. If these contradictions are to be brought in focus, if these ambiguities are to be resolved, it must be through the 'reconciliation of opposites.' And the reconciliation of opposites, as Coleridge has told us, is the function of the poet. So begins the first of these seventeen penetrating essays drawn from long and fruitful reflection of southern life and art by C. Hugh Holman. Professor Holman maintains that there is a congeries of characteristics identifiably present in much southern writing, and he astutely defines them in this collection. William Gilmore Simms, Ellen Glasgow, Thomas Wolfe, William Faulkner, and Flannery O'Connor are treated at length. Among the other authors considered in terms of their roles in the making of the southern mind are James Branch Cabell, T.S. Stribling, Erskine Caldwell, and Robert Penn Warren. The essays strike a fine balance between general overview and specific analysis, and they are so arranged as to make a unified study which forms a significant chapter in the intellectual history of the South. Professor Holman asserts that "out of the cauldron of the South's experience, the southern writer has fashioned tragic grandeur and given it as a gift to his fellow Americans. It is possible that no other southern accomplishment will equal it in enduring importance. As urbanization and industrialism conspire to write an 'Epitaph for Dixie,' its greatest contribution to mankind may well be the lesson of its history and the drama of its suffering." In these superb essays the author makes a convincing argument for that position.

Author : C. Hugh Holman
Publisher : University of Georgia Press
Page : 134 pages
File Size : 18,34 MB
Release : 2008
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 0820333573

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The Immoderate Past deals with the southern writer's preoccupation with history, concentrating on representative novelists from three major periods. Finding the origins of this preoccupation in the antebellum period, when most American novelists wrote in the mode of Sir Walter Scott, C. Hugh Holman examines the Revolutionary romances of William Gilmore Simms. With the coming of realism to American fiction after the Civil War, the southern writer turned to a combination of the realistic method with the novel of manners in order to describe the way of life in the South during the nineteenth century. The Civil War replaced the American Revolution as the crucial event in the novels of this second period and was seen as disrupting the quality and texture of antebellum southern life. To illustrate the southern novel in the realistic tradition, Holman discusses Ellen Glasgow's The Battleground, DuBose Heyward's Peter Ashley, Stark Young's So Red the Rose, Allen Tate's The Fathers, Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind, and Margaret Walker's Jubilee. Since the 1930s writers in the region have experimented with modernistic techniques distorting reality in order to make special statement about the nature and meaning of the southern experience. To illustrate this latest development in southern writing, Holman turns to William Faulkner's Light in August and Absalom, Absalom!; Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men, World Enough and Time, Brother to Dragons, and Wilderness; and William Styron's Confessions of Nat Turner. The Immoderate Past closes with a consideration of the extent to which southern novelists have persisted in using time as a major dimension in their fiction, whereas time has tended to be displaced by space in the standard American novel.

Author : Michael O'Brien
Publisher : University of Georgia Press
Page : 224 pages
File Size : 26,44 MB
Release : 2005
Category : History
ISBN : 9780820327112

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A lively introduction to a New England observer of southern thought and custom.

Author : William J. Cooper Jr.
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Page : 504 pages
File Size : 47,61 MB
Release : 2008-10-23
Category : History
ISBN : 0742563995

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In The American South: A History, Fourth Edition, William J. Cooper, Jr. and Thomas E. Terrill demonstrate their belief that it is impossible to divorce the history of the South from the history of the United States. The authors' analysis underscores the complex interaction between the South as a distinct region and the South as an inescapable part of America. Cooper and Terrill show how the resulting tension has often propelled section and nation toward collision. In supporting their thesis, the authors draw on the tremendous amount of profoundly new scholarship in Southern history. Each volume includes a substantial biographical essay—completely updated for this edition—which provides the reader with a guide to literature on the history of the South. Coverage now includes the devastation of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, up-to-date analysis of the persistent racial divisions in the region, and the South's unanticipated role in the 2008 presidential primaries.

Author : Louis D. Rubin, Jr.
Publisher : LSU Press
Page : 269 pages
File Size : 32,10 MB
Release : 1999-03-01
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 0807153648

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The flowering of literary imagination known as the American Renaissance had few roots in the South. While Hawthorne, Emerson, Melville, Thoreau, and Whitman were creating a body of work that would endure, the only southern writer making a lasting contribution was Edgar Allan Poe. This failure on the part of antebellum southern writers has long been a subject of debate among students of southern history and literature. Now one of the region's most distinguished men of letters offers a cogently argued and gracefully written account of the circumstances that prevented early southern writers from creating transcendent works of art. Louis D. Rubin, Jr., brings forty years of critical integrity and imaginative involvement with the history and literature of the South to his informal inquiry into the foundations of the southern literary imagination. His exploration centers on the lives and works of three of the most important writers of the pre-Civil War South: Poe, William Gilmore Simms, and Henry Timrod. In a close and highly original reading of Poe's poetry and fiction, Rubin shows just how profoundly growing up in Richmond, Virginia, influenced that writer. The sole author of the Old South whose work has endured did not use southern settings or concern himself with his region's history or politics. Poe was, according to Rubin, in active rebellion against the middle-class community of Richmond and its materialistic values. Simms, on the other hand, aspired to the plantation society ideal of his native Charleston, South Carolina. He was not the most devoted and energetic of southern writers and one of the country's best-known and most respected literary figures before the Civil War. Rubin finds an explanation for much of the lost promise of antebellum southern literature in Simms's career. Here was a talented man who got caught up in the politically obsessed plantation community of Charleston, becoming an apologist for the system and an ardent defender of slavery. Timrod, also a Charlestonian native, was a highly gifted poet whose work attained the stature of literature when the Civil War gave him a theme. He was known as the poet laureate of the Confederacy. Only when his region was locked in a desperate military struggle for the right to exist did he suddenly find his enduring voice. Anyone interested in southern life and literature will welcome his provocative and engaging new look at southern writing from one of the region's most perceptive critics.

Author : Numan V. Bartley
Publisher : LSU Press
Page : 576 pages
File Size : 44,67 MB
Release : 1995
Category : History
ISBN : 9780807119440

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First published in 1955 to wide acclaim, T. Harry Williams' P.G.T. Beauregard is universally regarded as "the first authoritative portrait of the Confederacy's always dramatic, often perplexing" general (Chicago Tribune). Chivalric, arrogant, and of exotic Creole Louisiana origin, Beauregard participated in every phase of the Civil War from its beginning to its end. He rigidly adhered to principles of war derived from his studies of Jomini and Napoleon, and yet many of his battle plans were rejected by his superiors, who regarded him as excitable, unreliable, and contentious. After the war, Beauregard was almost the only prominent Confederate general who adapted successfully to the New South, running railroads and later supervising the notorious Louisiana Lottery. This paradox of a man who fought gallantly to defend the Old South and then helped industrialize it is the fascinating subject of Williams' superb biography.

Author : Ethan S. Rafuse
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 653 pages
File Size : 44,66 MB
Release : 2017-11-28
Category : History
ISBN : 1351147781

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The largest and most destructive military conflict between the Napoleonic Wars and the First World War, the American Civil War has inspired some of the best and most intriguing scholarship in the field of United States history. This volume offers some of the most important work on the war to appear in the past few decades and offers compelling information and insights into subjects ranging from the organization of armies, historiography, the use of intelligence and the challenges faced by civil and military leaders in the course of America‘s bloodiest war.